Client Spotlight: JDDC Griswold Christmas

Sometimes I get to have a lot of fun in my job!

I have been working with the Jackson Downtown Development Corporation (JDDC) for a few months now and we are having a blast! In December, JDDC was planning their second annual Griswold Family Christmas. It’s a fun event where folks get together, have a catered dinner, and watch the holiday classic: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

While brainstorming how to promote this video, we decided someone needed to dress up like Cousin Eddie … well … in our case he was nicknamed Cousin “Neddy” (for those not in the know, the theater that the event was held in is called the Ned).

We started with a shout out on social media for someone with an appropriate RV to volunteer to be in the video shoot. Through the power of social, it turns out we had a friend one circle out that had the perfect vehicle that tied with the elements of the Cousin Eddie look. The pieces of the video came together perfectly!

This video did three things well:

  1. It surprised people. The thumbnail is someone dressed as cousin Eddie, which is pretty surprising. Even more so when the audience realizes it’s someone many folks in Jackson know. Surprise from a carefully selected frame helped get people to stay with the video.
  2. It was funny. The humor of someone in that getup and pulling off the character kept people around for the video. This was all Matt. He played his part perfectly!
  3. It helped sell tickets! We sold tickets for this event and this video helped do it! Becuase of the interaction on the video, it helped the organic reach of the video. Then, when we applied the ad budget, it went even further! Lots of people saw the video which helped us sell those tickets. It will also help us in the future when we retarget folks who have previously interacted with JDDC on Facebook!

A Follow Up: Best Self Journal

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the Best Self Journal and how they used social media marketing to get me to buy one. You can read that post here.

Starting the Best Self Journal a few months ago was a little bit out of my comfort zone. I do not normally use journals or paper products to push me to improve. Also with a name like Best Self Journal it kinda feels like a product sold after a cheesy motivational seminar.

via GIPHY

But I have been very pleased with how the Best Self Journal has helped me improve and challenged me. At this current moment in my life, I am in the process of scaling a marketing firm. This means lots of work, lots of time, and lots of different clients. Trying to grow enough cash flow to bring teammates on is exhausting on the front end. It’s really easy for my time to get away from me.

This affects all areas of my life: work, home, fitness, and community. I think the Journal has helped me stay focused on many of these areas better and helped me keep perspective. These things will help me from, ‘living in a van down by the river‘, hopefully!

Let’s talk specifics:

    1. Scheduling: The biggest thing that the BSJ has helped me with is time blocking out my day. I am really good with schedules and meetings. But how I spend the time around those usually was just spent putting out fires or whatever is the most urgent thing on my plate. This prevented me from making progress in balanced ways across my schedule. It also allowed me to get distracted from projects that I was already working on. The BSJ uses 30 minute time chunks through the day to help you block out time.Usually, at the end of the workday, I take a few minutes and look through my Asana task manager and my meetings for tomorrow and plan out my work schedule for the next day. I am able to allocate time for each of the projects I need to work on and even constrain email checking to specific time periods. This factor alone has increased my productivity considerably. For no other reason, other than this calendar function, this book is worth buying for me.
    2. Targets: Causing me to set targets for the day, 1-3 super important things to get done for the day, has allowed me to rest easier at night. Sometimes during the rush, it can be easy to forget how much you accomplished during the day and feel like you need to continue working all night. With these targets, it has given me the ability to look back and see that I have accomplished something and that it is okay to rest (at least occasionally). Conversely, if I have gotten distracted or lazy during the day, the targets can push me to get back on track and get important things accomplished even if takes a little extra time.
    3. Goal setting. I traditionally like big picture goals, like buying a house, but am not good at milestone goals to get there or progress toward those goals. The BSJ has a great goal mapping and follow up system. For example, every day, you write out your goals for the 13-week session. This helps to keep the goals on top of your mind. I am currently behind on two my three goals for this session, but it’s not because I have forgotten about them!

The way it breaks down your goals into steps and habits to accomplish them has been very helpful to me toward working on these goals and helping to become more of the person and business that I want to be.

 

How To Respond to Facebook’s News Feed Change

You may have heard about the Facebook news feed change. Here’s the announcement.
The question for those of us who create social media content is: now what?
The full truth is we don’t really know. We’ll watch as Facebook implements their new algorithm to see how it impacts our organic reaches and watch our own Newsfeeds transform.
In the meantime, I believe there are several key items to consider as we create content:
1. The death of organic reach has arrived. Organic reach has been dying for years. This is why I have said for a while now that Facebook marketing plans without a budget is not sufficient/modern. For example, I don’t take social clients without a decent social ads budget. Organic reach has dropped a lot over the last couple of years and this might be the death blow. That doesn’t mean organic reach will go away all together. But I believe it’s safe to say that it will no longer be enough to depend on organic reach to get your content to your customers.
2. Bad content will further restrict your pages reach. The restriction of organic reach will most likely effect pages that produce bad content. I think those who don’t do a good job at social media will be hurt worse than the good players. I explained myself in greater detail in my previous blog regarding this announcement. Facebook’s goal is to keep more people on Facebook and that means providing the best experience possible. So if the Facebook algorithm detects that people don’t like your posts on a regular basis, you will be punished for it. I think this is also a reaction to the polarized political content and *legitimate* fake news. The danger of Facebook is that we are building houses on rented land. I think this will most adversely affect small businesses who do a bad job with social media or do not know how to use social ads effectively.
3. Ad costs will continue to increase. Facebook’s ad inventory on its newsfeed filled up last summer and they were looking for new ad revenue. Facebook will continue to place ads because it’s their revenue stream. The cost may go up to weed out some ads but overall I don’t see a change in this coming quickly. Over time expect ad costs to continue to rise. Remember above all else, create quality content so that your customers are excited about the value your posts give them.

Engagement Bait: Big Facebook Update

via Facebook

 

Engagement Bait, what is it and how does it affect you?

 

Engagement Bait is a term that Facebook has rolled out that indicates how to get people to engage with your content via comments or likes. The graphic above shows three examples of engagement bait. Here is a list of five types of engagement bait:

  1. Vote Baiting: Asking users to vote via reaction to encourage engagement.
  2. React Baiting: Do this thing to show us what you think or get a result.
  3. Share Baiting: Share this post to enter a contest.
  4. Tag Baiting: Tag a friend who looks like this
  5. Comment baiting: Comment ‘yes’ if you love pie, or comment to enter

Why do people do this? It helps game the almighty algorithm. How? Well the Facebook Algorithm looks at how people are interacting with posts to see if it is any good. If people are sharing, liking, and commenting on a post, it signals to the algorithm that people want to see this post. So by artificially calling people to interact with a post instead of them interacting on their own free will because of the awesomeness of the content, they can get a boost in the newsfeed.

Why make this change? Facebook has two things it needs to do. Keep you on Facebook and make money. Engagement Bait is dangerous for both of those. To keep you on Facebook it needs to be a great experience and you need to see things that are interesting to you. Most of the time, items that are engagement bait are not that, they are spammy. Secondly, Facebook needs to continue to shorten the reach of pages so that they can sell ads. If you can get noticed by gaming the algorithm, you may be less likely to spend money.

Why is this now a big deal for marketers? Because now, Facebook is going to penalize you for doing this. Up to this point you could do engagement bait for posts or most likely contests and never have a problem. That is what is changing. Facebook is going to start actively demoting pages that break these rules. Not just the posts that break the rules, but the pages that do it. The Pages that break these rules will see the organic reach and paid reach drop even more if they break these rules. If they break these rules repeatedly, the may even see their page suspended.

What should you do now?

  1. Make better content. Make content people want to interact with.
  2. Spend money on reach: You need to have a Facebook boosting budget for your company. If you do not, you are living in the past!

For more information visit Facebook’s announcement. 

Social Media Win: Haltom Home Team

And what a win it was! The Haltom Home Team had the most viral video in Jackson (probably) ever. The Haltoms brought in Austin and Colin from That’s Classic Media, to create the “Relaxin in Jackson” video that went viral in fall of 2017. Check it out:

Though not super familiar with their careers, Austin and Colin are clearly super talented with both video production and music. I thought these guys looked familiar and then I realized they hit it big with a Nashville themed song a few years ago.

When I say it went viral, it has at least 406,000 views on Facebook. That excludes any dark posts that might have gone with advertising. More than 3,000 likes and reactions and more than 6 thousand shares! Those are unheard of statistics in Jackson.

What can we learn from this?

  1. Investing in content is smart. The Haltoms knew if they wanted to make an impact they were going to need to hire help. They found a great team to work with. Now, I am sure they also paid handsomely for this video, but to bring in experts, it costs money!
  2. The content they used was not necessarily reality based but their jobs are easier when people are excited about the territory where they are selling property.
  3. This should give them a great start in increasing name recognition. Not only did all those people just see the Haltoms name and see the team on camera, they interacted with a video from their page. This is a great opportunity to follow up with retargeting advertising based on that video interaction. They started to create a warm market and they have an opportunity to increase that brand recognition for a lower dollar amount by targeting folks who watched a portion of that video.
  4. Social Media Content goes quickly: The video went viral which is amazing. The next level of that is to continue to put out high-quality content. It would have been great to have a behind the scenes video to release on the back end of this video to target folks with. Social Media content is not just a one-time investment, it is a reoccurring investment.

Way to go Haltom’s and Austin and Colin!